FORUM: Bring common sense back to firearms regulation

Supporters of the protests that followed the death of Trayvon Martin are raising a good question: What next?

Many have compared the shooting of the 17-year-old to the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the black Chicago teen who was murdered in Mississippi, reportedly for whistling at a white woman.

The comparison is far from perfect. George Zimmerman, 28, the volunteer neighborhood watcher charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of the unarmed Martin, claims self-defense. Till's murderers were enforcing the racist political and social system then in the South.

As markers of their very different eras, the two cases have much in common, however.

Till's death inspired Rosa Parks a few months later to refuse to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus. Her move helped to launch the Montgomery bus boycotts, a decade of protests and landmark civil rights legislation.

If the Martin sympathizers are looking for a similar channel for their energies, they have an appropriate target in "stand your ground" laws.

Such a law in Florida was cited by Zimmerman, leading to his release by police without charges. That sparked protests by Martin's family and many people nationwide.

Florida's law says any law-abiding person "who is attacked" has "no duty to retreat" and "has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm."

There are two problems: The law is unnecessary and it is downright dangerous.

The basic right to defend yourself has been embedded for centuries in the "castle doctrine" -- from the old dictum "a man's home is his castle" -- in English common law. The right has a place in the statutes of most states.

The stand-your-ground law, signed in 2005 by former Gov. Jeb Bush, expanded that right to allow anyone, anywhere, to use deadly force against any person if he or she "reasonably believes" it is necessary.

Traditional castle law usually works fine, as illustrated by the case of Homer Wright, an 80-year-old Chicago bar owner. He recently shot a home invader in the leg -- and ended up being arrested along with the suspected invader. That was because it was illegal for Wright to own a gun after two weapons convictions in the early 1990s.

He posted bail, and prosecutors later dropped the charges without further comment. He was relieved, he told reporters, yet also annoyed that police didn't return his gun.

Ironically, local folks speculated, Wright might not have been charged at all were it not for the extra scrutiny that the Martin killing brought to self-defense cases. Better late than never, I say.

I'm not a zealot for banning all privately owned guns. I think, for example, two decades probably is enough good behavior to restore an 80-year-old entrepreneur's right to keep a firearm in his high-crime neighborhood.

Unfortunately, anything approaching reasonable, common-sense gun laws has become almost impossible because of zealotry on the other side.

Stand-your-ground laws, for example, are a great triumph of powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association and an ultraconservative ally, the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. Lest they become victims of their own success, just about every victory they have seems to be followed by a push toward a farther extreme.

As a result, the gun lobby pushes not only to pass extremist laws like stand your ground, but also to roll back reasonable, common-sense standards -- as when Virginia recently repealed its 19-year-old limit on personal handgun purchases to one per month.

"Common sense" is a widely overused term, yet it seems to me to suitably describe a limit of 12 new guns per year, especially to strike a blow against a criminal underground that gives law-abiding gun owners a bad name.

Bill Cosby made a good point when he recently said the debate over the killing of Martin should be focused on guns, not race. There may be no more fitting memorial to the slain teen than to revive some common sense in gun laws.